5.02.2010

We are in Guangzhou!

We are in the last leg of our journey, we are in Guangzhou. Today was our medical appointment and Kai was given 5 immunization shots...poor kid! He actually is doing pretty well considering his rough day. Dan and Bei spent the day in the pool and had a great time!

Remember how I said that Kai was going into "boot camp", well let me tell you the one that is really getting a workout is me! That little guy is a tank! He weighs a ton! I prefer to carry Bei because at least he can hang on to me and his weight is distributed. On about day 3 my hip starting hurting and I was thinking to myself, what a cruel irony it is that I probably have a huge tumor on my hip and that the end was near (oh the melodrama I can create in my own mind...), anyway, that night Kai woke up 3 times and I noticed this intense pain on the hip that I carry him around on...Eureka! What a relief to discover that I was not dying of huge tumor on my hip after all. Dan has now taken over the night time duty of walking Kai to sleep because my body just isn't up to the task. His back hurts too, but suck it up big guy...

We have learned a few things about babies and parenting. Here a few of them:

1. Did you know babies can tell time? Boy, if you miss one of their feedings that get really ornery!

2. If you feed cement (formula and rice cereal) to a baby it remains cement and has a difficult time coming out.

3. Did you know babies drink water? Well Dan and I didn't so refer back to number 2.

4. Dan does not enjoy getting puked on.

One last thing about Kai is that the "word of last week" was "stink-o!" How do you nicely say, "My kid smells really really bad." Honestly, I thought we going to nickname him stinky. The poor kid probably had not been given a bath in the past year. He had so much dirt in his bellybutton and he had this smell that just eminated from him. We wondered if they use cow dung to heat their homes. So when we were back in Fuzhou, we decided that Dan would keep Bei occupied in one bathtub and I would take the baby in the other bathtub and wash him really good. Do you see the failure of this plan all ready? Have you ever tried to hold onto Jello? Sure you have...but was your Jello screaming at the top of its lungs? The mission became "not to drop the baby" rather than washing the baby and getting him clean. Anyway, it took two more scrub downs where Dan and I colloborated together to get him smelling good. We were very fortunate that we were given all of Kai's belongings including his finding blanket. Normally, I would covet getting anything from the year that we have missed with him, but we only had the finding blanket laundered because the rest of it was rancid. I'm happy to have something from this past year.

Bei continue's to be doing remarkably well. He is really enjoying being on "vacation" and isn't pestering us to go home yet. Dan has lowered the boom on some of Bei's behaviors which has been really positive. Dad's just have a way of getting a message across that as a mom was taking too long to do. But overall Bei is accepting the situation. He still doesn't call the baby, Kai, he calls him baby brother. When I say the name Kai, he says, "I don't like that name." Oh well...things are going good overall.